Google Pay, the payments platform of Google India, has on-boarded hyperlocal delivery startup Dunzo on its platform as a storefront, at a time when demand for grocery and essentials remains high. This means one can run any task — grocery delivery, medicine delivery, pickup-and-drop — by using the Dunzo tab inside the payments app.
Dunzo, where Google is also an investor, is believed to be clocking over 1 lakh orders a day amid high demand for essential needs. For Dunzo, this would mean getting access to a large set of new users. For Google Pay, which is seeing higher usage in areas like utility payments but fewer payment volumes overall amid the lockdown, more consumers would frequent its app to use services like Dunzo and pay digitally.
In 2019, Google Pay had announced it has 67 million monthly active users (MAU) in India. Last month, TOI reported, quoting SimilarWeb data, that it had 115 million MAU in March, growing by 45% from February. As the number of Covid-19 positive cases are still rising in India, more consumers are going for online delivery of essentials.
Last week, Reliance Industries’ JioMart, which is running a pilot with Facebook-owned messaging application WhatsApp, announced that it has opened services in 200 cities. Other platforms like Swiggy, Zomato, Amazon India and Bigbasket are also scaling up their grocery play, with many of them offering deliveries in 2-4 hours from kirana stores.
“Consumables (grocery and other essentials) is now 75% of the total volumes for Dunzo, which was around 45% when the first lockdown was imposed in March. Fundamentally, it (shopping) has become need-based and there is no impulse that you can create as there is enough demand already. What this also does is you don’t have to discount,” Dunzo co-founder and CEO Kabeer Biswas told TOI last week.
Biswas added that this had led to customer acquisition costs coming down to zero for the Bengaluru-based startup. While Dunzo is trying to service higher volumes, it also took a decision of pausing deliveries in select geographies in the outskirts of cities to serve higher demand coming from within the city. This would be 5-6% of its total geographical reach. It is present in eight cities including Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru and Chennai.
A Google Pay spokesperson confirmed the Dunzo storefront on its platform. “The launch of the Dunzo Spot and the addition of LPG service providers are all examples of how we’re solving this (customer and business needs),” it added.
Google Pay recently expanded the footprint of the Nearby Stores Spot to 35 cities, where users can find if nearby stores, selling essentials, are open and make digital payments if the store offers delivery. Google Pay rival PhonePe also has a similar offering on its platform named Stores. A Dunzo spokesperson did not respond to TOI’s emailed query till the time of going to the press. Some other storefronts, or ‘Spots’, on Google Pay include MakeMyTrip and Urban Company (formerly UrbanClap).
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